British Petroleum finds itself widely and vociferously criticised because of its activities in in the Gulf of Mexico, with ‘British’ used by some as a term of abuse. It is ironic that British Petroleum was originally created by a German company. Before the First World War oil and petrol were beginning to replace coal as [more...]
Few people know how much the water from their cold tap costs, and even fewer realise how much the water from their hot tap costs. The cost of cold water in the UK is around a quarter of a penny per liter, so that’s our starting point. How much more does it cost to heat [more...]
Albert Einstein‘s theory is known as the Theory of Relativity because its core principle is that the speed of light in a vacuum is always the same, relative to the observer. This is totally unlike the speed of anything else. If you are driving along the motorway at 100km/hr and the car in the next [more...]
Vitroceramic cooktops are flat and sleek, but they also look fragile. How robust are they? A vitroceramic stove top is a sheet of glassified ceramic which has been heated in such a way as to remove internal discontinuities where cracks would develop. A cooker made from this glass-ceramic substance is surprisingly strong. The instruction manual [more...]
In older diet books the energy content of foods is stated in Calories, and yet when we read product labels we may find kilocalories and kilojoules. The prefix “kilo” means a thousand, so what gives? When Nicolas Clément devised the Calorie in 1824, he defined it as the energy required to heat one kilogram of [more...]
You may have seen videos such as this one, where a group of people at a party put their phones on the table around some corn kernels. They call the phones, and when the phones start ringing, the popcorn pops. Does this really happen? Wouldn’t the phone be doing the same to our brains when [more...]
Green energy is a somewhat nebulous term, but we’ll take it to refer to energy sources that are carbon neutral, and are replenished naturally within timescales of the order of a human lifetime. That gives us quite a few sources of green energy. Hydro power harnesses the energy of moving water. This can take the [more...]
In the UK this is new technology in the domestic environment. According to BWEA, a renewable energy trade association, in 2007 approximately 3500 micro- and small-wind turbines were deployed with the UK. The 2008 figures are expected to be higher. Wind turbines providing “green energy” can now be purchased from DIY stores, but should be [more...]
Because Google is such a large organization, there’s considerable interest in its energy consumption. Google has provided some figures, which they say take into account not just the query itself but also activities such as building the search index. That’s a reasonable way to approach the answer, and also one of the easiest to calculate [more...]